I was not going to write anything about the non-event of Hammond’s Spring statement, in part because I confess I am tired of writing about the Conservative party’s hopeless macroeconomic policy. It is like being forced to second mark all the fails from a first year economics exam.

Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is sworn in by the President of the German lower house during the government’s swearing-in ceremony at the Bundestag in Berlin.

The tech giants’ need for ‘engagement’ to keep revenues flowing means they are loath to stop driving viewers to ever-more unsavoury content

Zeynep Tufecki is one of the shrewdest writers on technology around. A while back, when researching an article on why (and how) Donald Trump appealed to those who supported him, she needed some direct quotes from the man himself and so turned to YouTube, which has a useful archive of videos of his campaign rallies. She then noticed something interesting. “YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay’ videos for me,” she wrote, “that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.”

Since Tufecki was not in the habit of watching far-right fare on YouTube, she wondered if this was an exclusively rightwing phenomenon. So she created another YouTube account and started watching Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaign videos, following the accompanying links suggested by YouTube’s “recommender” algorithm. “Before long,” she reported, “I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of 11 September. As with the Trump videos, YouTube was recommending content that was more and more extreme.”

YouTube is embarrassed by the way it is being exploited by unsavoury actors; on the other, its bottom line is improved by ‘user engagement’

In an interview with the writer Owen Jones, Ralf Little says he became embroiled in a Twitter row with Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, because he believed the government was trying to turn people against doctors. The actor, who starred in The Royle Family and 24 Hour Party People, accuses Hunt of arrogance in dealing with recent strikes by junior doctors.

“It’s like Spain in 1936.” Those are the words of Alexander Norton, a charismatic 31-year-old railway worker from east London, as Turkish forces besiege the Kurdish city of Afrin. Like Britain’s courageous International Brigades eight decades earlier, Norton risked his life to fight Isis alongside Kurdish freedom fighters in Kurdish Syria. As you read this, a secular democracy which celebrates women’s rights is under attack, including by Turkish-aligned troops who have sung al-Qaida songs and threatened to cut off the heads of their “atheist” victims. If you’re wondering why Kurds and their supporters occupied King’s Cross and Manchester Piccadilly stations last weekend: here’s why. The Conservative government is arming to the teeth a nation ruled by an authoritarian despot, whose regime is linked to extreme jihadist groups, and which is now attempting to liquidate one of the only islands of democracy in a sea of Middle Eastern despotism: and yet virtually no one is speaking out about it.

Theresa May has already shown how robust she is in opposing Putin. Because after Putin's opponent Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, she rejected setting up an inquiry into who did it. But that was different, because back then the Russians were kind poisoners

The UK has been living through the most feeble and protracted economic recovery in modern British history, leaving people on course to be almost £9,000 worse off on average by 2022-23 relative to the pre-crisis trend, according to calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The bonanza, in the end, failed to materialise. There had been a fair amount of talk before the Spring Statement that Philip Hammond would be in a position to unveil a new dawn for our beleaguered public finances.